Adding visual grouping to scene tree

[Alfredoes234]

I think that it would be really cool if you could group the nodes in the scene in a more visual way to reduce visual clutter from more packed scenes and makes it at least in my opinion less confusing. Such as used in design software such as this image.

But I am interested to hear other peoples opinions and reasons why the current method visually works or doesn't.

[Meorge]

I'm not sure how what you used here as an example differs from Godot? This sounds like it'd be the equivalent of having a Node with children in it.

[Alfredoes234]

It's because if I make say I have a bunch of coins and I want them to disappear when they are collected if I put it in a node with a coin being the top node then it will get rid of all the nodes in the tree but I don't want that whereas grouping would allow them to be collected individually whilst being part of a a collective. Technically I could order it using a blank node but I feel that grouping would make sense because that is all you are doing and there is already grouping but not visually.

[Meorge]

If you have a coin scene, you could just place instance of it as children of your world scene, and then have a script on the coin that runs queue_free when it's collected to destroy only itself without destroying any other coins.

If you want a way to find all of the coins in your world, you may want to look into groups.

Other than that, I think using a blank "coin container" node that you make all coins children of would make the most sense. Keep in mind that the node hierarchy shown in Godot's editor is important for things like execution and drawing order; it's not just there for organizational purposes on the user side.

Providing ways to change the visual tree's hierarchy while keeping the underlying node structure the same would likely lead to confusing behavior. Users may not understand why their game logic isn't executing in the expected order, when it's because they're viewing it in "visual mode" versus "actual mode", if that makes sense.

[Alfredoes234]

I did not mean to suggest messing up the hierarchy but as I said in reply something similar acting to a blank node that maybe hooks into the pre-existing group system could be quite cool. As I don't think that mess anything up to do with hierarchy because it would still execute in order and I feel it makes more sense visually rather than an indicator on each individual node in the group as shown below. But I could potentially see an issue where you don't want to group the same thing hierarchically and that would be hard to figure out.

[Alfredoes234]

Or in the groups node section you could have a tree showing all the items in the group with items you can click on and will take you to them. keeping the functionality without making it more complex. Basically a little UX.